He was so much in favour with King Charles, that he was made one of the gentlemen of the bed-chamber, and comptroller of Woodstock Park. -Having an active and inquisitive mind, he never, except in his paroxysms of intemperance, was wholly negligent of study: he read what is considered as polite learning so much, that he is mentioned by Wood as the greatest scholar of all the nobility. Sometimes he retired into the country, and anused himself with writing libels, in which he did not pretend to confine himself to truth. His favourite author in French was Boileau, and in English Cowley. Thus in a course of drunken gaiety, and gross sensuality, with intervals of study perhaps yet more criminal, with an avowed contempt of all decency and order, a total disregard to every moral, and a resolute denial of every religious obligation, he lived worthless and useless, and blazed out his youth and his health in lavish voluptuousness; till, at the age of one and thirty, he had exhausted the fund of life, and reduced himself to a state of weakness and decay. At this time he was led to an acquaintance with Dr. Burnet, to whom he laid open with great freedom the tenour of his opinions, and the course of his life, and from whom he received such conviction of the reasonableness of moral duty and the truth of Christianity, as produced a total change both of his manners and opinions. The account of those salutary consequences is given by Burnet, in a book intituled, Some Passages of the Life and Death of John Earl of Rochester; which the critick ought to read for its elegance, the philosopher for its arguments, and the saint for its piety. It were an injury to the reader to offer him an abridgement. He died July 26, 1680, before he had compleated his thirty-fourth year; and was so worn away by a long illness, that life went out without a struggle. Lord Rochester was eminent for the vigour of his colloquial wit, and remarkable for many wild pranks and sallies of extravagance. The glare of his general character diffused itself upon his writings; the compositions of a man whose name was heard of so often were certain of attention, and from many readers certain of applause. This blaze of reputation is not yet quite extinguished; and his poetry still retains some splendour beyond that which genius has bestowed. Wood and Burnet give us reason to believe, that much was imputed to him which he did not write. I know not by whom the original collection was made, or by what authority its genuineness was ascertained. The first edition was published in the year of his death, with an air of concealment, professing in the title page to be printed at Antwerp. Of some of the pieces, however, there is no doubt. The Imitation of Horace's Satire, the Verses to Lord Mulgrave, the Satire againt Man, the Verses upon Nothing, and perhaps some others, are I believe genuine, and perhaps most of those which this collection exhibits. As he cannot be supposed to have found leisure for any course of continued study, his pieces are commonly short, such as one fit of resolution would produce. His songs have no particular character; they tell, like other songs, in smooth and and easy language, of scorn and kindness, dismission and desertion, absence and inconstancy, with the common places of artificial courtship. They are commonly smooth and easy; but have little nature, and little sentiment. His imitation of Horace on Lucilius is not inelegant or unhappy. In the reign of Charles the Second began that adaptation, which has since been very frequent, of ancient poetry to present times; and perhaps few will be found where the parallelism is better preserved than in this. The versification is indeed sometimes careless, but it is sometimes vigorous and weighty. The strongest effort of his Muse is his poem upon Nothing. He is not the first who has chosen this barren topick for the boast of his fertility. There is a poem called Nihil in Latin by Passerat, a poet and critick of the sixteenth century in France; who, in his own epitaph, expresses his zeal for good poetry thus: -Molliter ossa quiescent Sint modo carminibus non onerata malis. His works are not common, and therefore I shall subjoin his verses. In examining this performance, Nothing must be considered as having not only a negative but a kind of positive signification; as I need not fear thieves, I have nothing, and nothing is a very powerful protector. In the first part of the sentence it is taken negatively; in the second it is taken positively, as an agent. In one of Boileau's lines it was a question, whether he should use à rien faire, or à ne rien faire; and the first was preferred, because it gave rien a sense in some sort positive. Nothing can be a subject only in its positive sense, and such a sense is given it in the first line; Nothing, thou elder brother ev'n to shade. In this line, I know not whether he does not allude to a curious book de Umbra, by Wowerus, which, having told the qualities of Shace, ce ncludes with a poem in which are these lines: Jam primum terram validis circumspice claustris Terrasque tractusque maris, camposque liquentes Omnibus UMBRA prior. The positive sense is generally preserved, with great skill, through the whole poem; though sometimes in a subordinate sense, the negative nothing is injudiciously mingled. Passerat confounds the two senses. Another of his most vigorous pieces is his Lampoon on Sir Car Scroop, who, in a poem called The Praise of Satire, had some lines like these *: He who can push into a midnight fray, This was meant of Rochester, whose buffoon conceit was, I suppose, a saying often mentioned, that every Man would be a Coward if he durse; and drew from I quote from memory, Dr. J. him those furious verses; to which Scroop made in reply an epigram, ending with these lines: Thou canst hurt no man's fame, with thy ill word; Thy pen is full as harmless as thy sword. Of the Satire against Man, Rochester can only claim what remains when all Boileau's part is taken away. In all his works there is spriteliness and vigour, and every where may be found tokens of a mind which study might have carried to excellence. What more can be expected from a life spent in ostentatious contempt of regularity, and ended before the abilities of many other men began to be displayed? VOL. I. Poema Cl. V. JOANNIS PASSERATII, Regii in Academia Parisiensi Professoris, Ad ornatissimum virum ERRICUM MEMMIUM. Usque adeò ingenii nostri est exhausta facultas, Pura liquefaciunt simul, & patrimonia miscent, Diique NIHIL metuunt. Quid longo carmine plura Sed tempus finem argutis imponere nugis: Ne tibi si multa laudem mea carmina charta, De NIHILO NIHILI pariant fastidia versus. W ROSCOM MO N. of ENTWORTH DILLON, Earl of Roscommon, was the son James Dillon and Elizabeth Wentworth, sister to the earl of Strafford. He was born in Ireland, during the lieutenancy of Strafford, who, being both his uncle and his godfather, gave him his own surname. His father, the third earl of Roscommon, had been converted by Usher to the protestant religion; and when the popish rebellion broke out, Strafford thinking the family in great danger from the fury of the Irish, sent for his godson, and placed him at his own seat in Yorkshire, where he was instructed in Latin; which he learned so as to write it with purity and elegance, though he was never able to retain the rules of grammar. Such is the account given by Mr. Fenton, from whose notes on Waller most of this account must be borrowed, though I know not whether all that he relates ! lates is certain. The instructor whom he assigns to Roscommon is one Dr. Hall, by whom he cannot mean the famous Hall, then an old man and a bishop. When the storm broke out upon Strafford, his house was a shelter no longer; and Dillon, by the advice of Usher, was sent to Caen, where the Protestants had then an university, and continued his studies under Bochart. Young Dillon, who was sent to study under Bochart, and who is represented as having already made great proficiency in literature, could not be more than nine years old. Strafford went to govern Ireland in 1633, and was put to death eight years afterwards. That he was sent to Caen, is certain: that he was a great scholar, may be doubted. At Caen he is said to have had some preternatural intelligence of his father's death. "The lord Roscommon, being a boy of ten years of age, at Caen in Nor"mandy, one day was, as it were, madly extravagant in playing, leaping, get"ting over the tables, boards, &c. He was wont to be sober enough; they said, God grant this bodes no ill-luck to him! In the heat of this extra"vagant fit, he cries out, My father is dead. A forthnight after, news came "from Ireland that his father was dead. This account I had from Mr. "Knolles, who was his governor, and then with him,-since secretary to the "earl of Strafford; and I have heard his lordship's relations confirm the "same." Aubrey's Miscellany. The present age is very little inclined to favour any accounts of this kind nor will the name of Aubrey much recommend it to credit: it ought not, however, to be omitted, because better evidence of a fact cannot casily be found than is here offered, and it must be by preserving such relations that we may at last judge how much they are to be regarded. If we stay to examine this. account, we shall see difficulties on both sides: here is the relation of a fact given by a man who had no interest to deceive, and who could not be deceived himself; and here is, on the other hand, a miracle which produces no effect; the order of nature is interrupted to discover not a future but only a distant event, the knowledge of which is of no use to him to whom it is revealed. Between these difficulties, what way shall be found? Is reason or testimony to be rejected; I believe what Osborne says of an appearance of sanctity may be applied to such impulses or anticipations as this: Do not wholly slight them, because they may be true; but do not easily trust them, because they may be false. The state both of England and Ireland was at this time such, that he who was absent from either country had very little temptation to return: and therefore Roscommon, when he left Caen, travelled into Italy, and amused himself with its antiquities, and particularly with medals, in which he acquired uncommon skill. At the Restoration, with the other friends of monarchy, he came to England, was made captain of the band of Pensioners, and learned so much of the dissoluteness of the court, that he addicted himself immoderately to gaming, by |